Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to enterprise data management and more specifically to usage of tags when storing relationship information of enterprise objects.
Related Art
Enterprise objects are often used to model/represent physical or conceptual objects (business elements) according to the requirements of a specific business environment. Each enterprise object may contain data representing the characteristics of the corresponding physical/conceptual object being modeled.
For example, in an inventory management system, different enterprise objects may be defined corresponding to a customer, an order, an item, a vendor, etc. A “customer” enterprise object may contain data representing the name of the customer, the location of the customer, the order placed by the customer, etc. Such a representation facilitates convenient interaction between users and software systems.
Relationships often exist between the physical/conceptual objects being modeled. For example, a “customer” object may have a relationship with an “order” object in that the specific order is placed by the specific customer. Accordingly, relationship information is often stored to indicate such relationships.
Tags are often used in the storage of information. A tag generally contains text, which is commonly searched identify and/or to access specific enterprise objects of interest. For example, in an inventory management system, it may be desirable to find the enterprise objects representing the customer, the items, the vendor, etc., which are related to an order (another enterprise object). Tags may be stored associated with the objects to facilitate searching, as is well known in the relevant arts.
It may be desirable that the search facility provided for enterprise objects be improved, for example, to facilitate faster (more efficient) identification of the enterprise objects matching a desired criteria.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.